We performed a comparison between Looker and Tableau based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Embedded BI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. I didn't face any issues with stability."
"We can centralize all our data models."
"It's quite effortless to navigate through various applications and review their updated data in real-time."
"With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability."
"From a developer's perspective, the way the functionality's being handled is great."
"Looker allows you to generate the most optimal SQL queries in a DC through UI actions. We had signed a contract with Google Cloud to use BigQuery. That was the primary reason we adopted Looker. It works better with BigQuery than any other BI platform. We also like how this tool was developed. It was designed with an eye toward microservices architecture."
"The product is easy to use."
"It is a pretty stable solution because it is a cloud-based product."
"Tableau has greatly enhanced our organization's data-driven decision-making processes by enabling us to create visually compelling reports and dashboards."
"Self-service is most valuable. Users can pick up quickly and do the resolution. There are a lot of out-of-the-box features, and it satisfies most of the needs. If users are properly trained, they can deal with any situation."
"One of the most valuable features of Tableau is that it's a visual analytics solution, not just a dashboarding solution. Compared to Power BI, which is a dashboarding solution, there are no limitations with Tableau. For example, when you add a chart or a map to Power BI, it has a 3,000-point limitation. When you try to track your whole vehicle on the map, you only see the first 3,000 rows on the map, and Power BI doesn't tell you which part of the data is shown on the map. But Tableau doesn't have any limitations, which means that you can see five million data points on a map. It starts the project by creating the visuals that directly converts to SQLs. In that way, all the components have no limitations. When we compared Tableau to Power BI, we also found Tableau to be more fancy. Fancy means you can create more visual graphics and more visual dashboards. With Power BI, this isn't so—it's just some tables and some simple charts together. Tableau is more for business users who want to analyze data. Tableau can directly connect the analytics systems, like R or Titan, and get the results in screen, so it's a good solution for analytics scientists. It has some predefined capabilities to understand the data."
"The ease of presenting findings is very helpful."
"It's very easy to set everything up."
"Easy for beginners to use"
"The most important feature is the tool is very easy to use. This makes it simple to introduce it to CxOs. After a rapid demo, they are usual impressed by the results shown, because it has such a rare simplicity."
"The action feature which Tableau has is very useful for us. If we click on one visualization, it will pass the value to another visualization. That interactivity within different visualizations is the most valuable feature of Tableau."
"The main area of concern in Looker is probably related to blending the data from the different sources, including the data present internally in the company and on the cloud."
"It needs to be more user-friendly."
"Looker doesn't connect to Excel, which is a huge disappointment because a lot of data is presented in Excel. Also, it can't consume data directly from REST APIs, which is necessary. Looker needs to expand its horizons when it comes to data sources. The inability to connect to different data sources is hampering our use cases. Currently, it only has an ODBC connection that connects to a database. It needs to connect to other data sources, such as Excel, APIs, and different platforms."
"The integration with different databases must be improved."
"Stability needs improvement."
"The visualization capability of the product is limited."
"The product does not have documented material."
"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."
"Include forecasting on table calculation fields."
"There should be more GIS features, such as location analysis, which is quite limited. There are very few location-based functionalities."
"An area needing improvement involves the complexity of the product should you need to alter a lot of parameters. If you have technical servers, much interface, different providers and more serious processes, that will be time consuming."
"In the cloud sometimes the performance is a little bit slow."
"I don't have the ability in Tableau to create a tooltip and see the picture of a piece of jewelry or watch that is a best seller."
"The pricing is a bit higher than the competition. They'll need to lower it to stay competitive."
"Maybe the price could be a bit cheaper, especially if you're a personal developer that uses Tableau just to explore smaller data sets and you're not a company or something like that."
"They need to improve the icons and the filters, because they look too old, resembling Excel from 1997."
Looker is ranked 5th in Embedded BI with 19 reviews while Tableau is ranked 1st in Embedded BI with 293 reviews. Looker is rated 8.0, while Tableau is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Looker writes "The APIs are exposed at every level, so it's highly modular". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Tableau writes "Provides fast data access with in-memory extracts, makes it easy to create visualizations, and saves time". Looker is most compared with Amazon QuickSight, Google Data Studio, Databricks, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and Qlik Sense, whereas Tableau is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Domo, Amazon QuickSight, SAS Visual Analytics and Oracle Hyperion. See our Looker vs. Tableau report.
See our list of best Embedded BI vendors.
We monitor all Embedded BI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.